Peggy O'Neal. Alfred Henry Lewis
you say; doubtless that is true. I confess I do not, since this is almost my first visit to the town. But I know men, and of what else is society compounded? Their heaviest frown, if one but think coolly and be sure of one's self, should not weigh down a feather.”
“Why, yes,” she cried, “you know men. But do you know women? Men are as so many camp followers of society; it is the women who make the fighting line. And oh! their shafts are tipped with venom!”
“It cannot be so bad,” I insisted. “So-called society, which must take on somewhat the character of come-and-go with the ebb and flow of administrations, begins with the White House, does it not?”
“We will do our best,” smiled Peg, without replying to my question.
Probably she comprehended the hopeless sort of my ignorance and the uselessness of efforts to set forth to me the “Cabinet Circle,” the “Senate Circle,” the “Supreme Court Circle,” and those dozen other mysterious rings within rings, wheels within wheels, which the complicated perfection of capital social life offers for the confusion of folk.
“Unquestionably, the White House,” Peg went on, “is the citadel, the great tower, and we can always retreat to that. We will do well enough; but oh!”—here Peg laid her hand like a rose leaf on my arm—“you do not understand, a man can not understand, what we shall go through.”
“Let us have stout hearts for all that,” said I. “It behooveth us to be bold, since no victory, even over weakness, was ever constructed of timidity. Besides, the foe may offer us its defeat by its own errors. I recall, how once upon a time, certain Creeks whom the General was to attack entrenched themselves, and all about felled trees and sharpened the branches into points, the whole as defensive as any bristle of bayonets. You, as thought these red engineers, would have deemed the place impregnable, for no one might force his way through this chevaux de-frise. But the General's military eye unlocked the situation. The sun-dried leaves and twigs were lying where they fell. An arrow, with blazing tow tied to its shaft and shot from a safe two hundred yards away, solved the problem. In a moment that precious defence was on fire; and the enemy, driven forth by the heat and flame and smoke of it, were met in the open and destroyed to a man. We may yet smoke these society savages into a surrender by setting an honest torch to their surroundings. One thing we can promise ourselves.” I remarked this in conclusion. “Whatever else may fail, at the worst, you shall not go wanting a revenge.”
“And that thought is sweet, too,” said she in return.
Peg's leopard teeth were not without significance; that much I saw. After all, her speech was to have been expected; for who will go further afield for revenge than your flesh and blood true woman, still of earth's fires and not ready for the skies?
Peg told me a portion of her story; partly because it was natural she should think that I, who had been a stranger to her, might justly want such knowledge; but mostly, I believe, for that she had an instinct to defend herself against what I might have preconceived to her disaster. Dear child, she had small cause to fret herself on that score! I remember she gave herself no little blame as the self-willed gardener of those thorny sorrows among which she had walked and was still sorrowfully to find her path. She would run on like this, as I recall:
“The first fault belonged with this tavern of an Indian Queen. I could have been no older than eight when I knew how folk who came here, Congressmen and officers of state and their ladies, looked upon us who kept the place as but servants over servants, and took care not to meet us on an equal footing with themselves. My father and mother were disrated as mere tavern-keepers who sold their entertainment to any and to all; and I, so soon as I came to discretion and an ability to apprehend, found myself included in the ban thus set upon my people. I've seen nurses skurry to carry their charges off from childish games with me and the contamination of my baby contact. Later, in girlhood, I've overheard mothers while they warned their daughters to avoid me, and experienced the tilt-nosed airs of those same daughters who with superior arts of insolence stung me like wasps. More often than once, I've crept away to tears of shame because I was the daughter of a tavern.
“But in the end it hardened me. I had a perverse, retaliatory temper. I grew up beautiful, so folk told me; moreover, I knew it but too well by the merest glance in a glass. With my beauty,”—Peg spoke of it in mixed simplicity and sadness as though she recounted deformity—“I was wont to fashion my revenge. My father—not a poor man, for while taverns may be vulgar they maybe profitable—was ever ready to spend money on me; and I had only to hint at a comb or a ribbon or a ring, to find the gewgaw an hour after on my table. Good, poor man! my father, calm and careless enough under his condition so far as it rested on himself, felt for my humiliations, which now and again he could not fail to see, and sought with trinketry and luxury of dress to repair the injury. Neither he nor my mother spoke of what they both must have felt, that is our nosocial condition, if one may so describe it; and for myself, I was too proud, and too tenderly in love with them for their thousand kindnesses, to bring it upon their notice.
“As I've said, I made my beauty the method of my revenge. I owned taste as well as looks, and my wits were as deep and as quick and as bright as my eyes. I've set many a wrinkle on many a fair brow by defeating it to second place in that woman's rivalry of looks.
“For these wars, where loveliness tilts against loveliness, my allies were the men. Compliment for me was never silent on their lips. I was the town's toast as I grew up. This put the women to an opposite course. As the men spoke of my beauty, the women shrugged their pure shoulders and told of my boldness; and I must confess that in a native vivacity, together with that rebellion of the spirit born of their attitude towards me, I gave them endless evidence to go upon. I have lived my life without an immorality or the shadow of one; I have done no wrong wherewith to shame myself; but, reckless, careless, and with the frank ignorance of innocence—and then, to be sure, because it made those others angry—I was greedy of men's praise, withal too free of speech and eye, and thereby offered tongues eager to assail me the argument required as material for their ill work. They, the women, wove for me as bad a story as they might, and then wrapped it about me for a reputation. How I loathed and hated them! those who, worsted of my beauty, would tear me with calumny by way of reprisal!
“Now I must tell you, it was I who wearied first of that game where it was beauty on the one side against icy stare, arched brow, and covert innuendo on the other. No; my tongue would not have spared them—it was never a patient member, that tongue!—but for such artillery, as you would call it, my persecutors were out of reach. There is a gravity of words; they descend and never climb; they must, like a stone, come tumbling from above to do an injury. Wherefore these folk high up were safe from me—safe from everything except my beauty; and since I maintained myself without a stain upon my virtue, even my beauty wore for them and theirs no real peril. Above, on the cliffs of society, they rolled down tale and whisper against me like so many black stones; in retort, though I might be beautiful and so madden them with the possession of what they lacked, I from below could harm them nothing. I think, too, some in pain of their own ugliness, envied and would have changed places with me. They would not, had they known what I knew and felt what I felt. My soul was in torment, and I grew never so callous but the darts of their forked malignancy would pierce and pain.
“It was to avoid conditions which grew at last intolerable—for I brooded when alone and magnified the evils of my position, turning morbid the while—that I wedded Mr. Timberlake. I never loved him; I took him to be a refuge rather than a husband, and my little life with him was not a happy one. By no fault of his, however; I think he loved me, and I know he did his best. I had nothing from him save kindness, and when he died in the Mediterranean I doubt not he carried into the other world a sincere regard for me.
“And I would have loved him if I could.” Peg waved her hand with an accent of despair, and as one who had striven and failed beyond recall. “But I could not—could not; strive as I might, love would not come. I felt guilt to live with him; I was glad when he sailed away; and, God help me! my sighs over his death were the sighs of one released from bonds.”
Peg broke and cried like any child. You should understand, however, that she was unjust to herself. What